An ultrasound system has become an important and popular diagnostic tool since it has a wide range of applications. Specifically, due to its non-invasive and non-destructive nature, the ultrasound system has been extensively used in the medical profession. Modern high-performance ultrasound systems and techniques are commonly used to produce two or three-dimensional images of internal features of an object (e.g., human organs).
The ultrasound system is configured to transmit an ultrasound signal to a target object and receive an ultrasound signal reflected from the target object (i.e., ultrasound echo signal) to thereby form a receive signal. The ultrasound system is further configured to perform an analog-to-digital conversion upon the receive signal to form sampling data and perform beam forming processing upon the sampling data to thereby form receive-focused data. The ultrasound system is further configured to form an ultrasound image by using the receive-focused data.
As the processing speed of a central processing unit (CPU) becomes faster, the software beam forming processing, which is performed in CPU, has been adopted. Currently, a pixel-oriented beam forming technique, which is a popular technique among the software beam forming techniques, is implemented by extracting sampling data corresponding to a path length for the respective transducers for pixels of an ultrasound image to be formed and performing beam forming processing (i.e., summing) upon the extracted sampling data. This pixel-oriented beam forming technique is characterized by a low amount of computation and easy implementation. However, in such a technique, there is a problem since a noise pattern caused by the pixel-oriented beam forming technique may affect the resolution of an ultrasound image.